In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—a period that marked the emergence of a global modernity—educated landowners, or “gentlemen,” dominated the development of British natural history, utilizing networks of trade and empire to inventory nature and understand events across the world. Specimens, ranging from a Welsh bittern to the plants of Botany Bay, were collected, recorded, and classified, while books were produced in London and copies distributed and used across Britain, Continental Europe, the Pacific, Asia, and the Americas. Natural history connected a diverse range of individuals, from European landowners to Polynesian priests, incorporating, distributing, synthesizing, and appropriating information collected on a global scale.
In Reading the World, Edwin D. Rose positions books, natural history specimens, and people in a close cycle of literary production and consumption. His book reveals new aspects of scientific practice and the specific roles of individuals employed to collect, synthesize, and distribute knowledge—reevaluating Joseph Banks’s and Daniel Solander’s investigations during James Cook’s Endeavour voyage to the Pacific. Uncovering the range of skills involved in knowledge production, Rose expands our understanding of natural history as a cyclical process, from the initial collection and identification of specimens to the formal publication of descriptions to the eventual printing of sources.
The author of Free returns with an extraordinary inquiry into historical injustice, dignity, truth, and imagination.
When Lea Ypi discovers a photo of her grandmother, Leman, honeymooning in the Alps in 1941 posted by a stranger on social media, she is faced with unsettling questions. Growing up, she was told all records of her grandmother’s youth were destroyed in the early days of communism in Albania. But there Leman was with her husband, Asllan Ypi: glamorous newlyweds while World War II raged.
What follows is a thrilling reimagining of the past, spanning the vanished world of Ottoman aristocracy, the making of modern Greece and Albania, a global financial crisis, and the horrors of war and the dawn of communism in the Balkans. While investigating the truth about her family, Ypi grapples with uncertainty. Who is the real Leman Ypi? What made her move to Tirana as a young woman and meet a socialist who sympathized with the Popular Front while his father led a collaborationist government? And, above all, why was she smiling in the winter of 1941?
By turns epic and intimate, profound and gripping, Indignity shows what it is like to make choices against the tide of history—and reveals the fragility of truth, collective and personal. Through secret police reports of communist spies, court depositions, and Ypi’s memories of her grandmother, we move between present and past, archive and imagination. With what moral authority do we judge the acts of previous generations? And what do we really know about the people closest to us?
Kostas Axelos, The Game of the World, trans. Justin Clemens and Hellmut Munz – Edinburgh University Press, April 2023, paperback February 2025
Now in paperback
A philosophical treatment of play in the twentieth century
Appeals to a potentially broad audience including those interested in thinking through globalisation today
The magnum opus of an influential French-Greek intellectual whose contemporaries and influences include Derrida, Deleuze and Lefebvre
Approaches philosophy in a systematic as well as fragmentary manner
Anticipates the key term of contemporary Heideggerian scholarship (German Irre, French errance) and confronts it through play
A French reprint of Le Jeu du Monde was published by Les Belles Lettres in January 2018
Kostas Axelos traces his thinking on the world deployed as play from Heraclitus through to the culmination of metaphysical philosophy with Nietzsche, Marx and Heidegger.
At the heart of Kostas Axelos’s ambitious and pioneering system, this encyclopaedia of fragments has long exercised a powerful influence in French thought on play, game and world. Axelos could not have asked for more sympathetic, attentive and poetic translators in Clemens and Monz. His anglophone readers and interlocuters await.– Stuart Elden, University of Warwick
Kostas Axelos (1924–2010) was a Greek-French philosopher and translator. A specialist in Heraclitus, Karl Marx and Martin Heidegger, as well as in Friedrich Hölderlin and Stéphane Mallarmé, he taught and researched at the Sorbonne, as well as at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique and at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. The Game of the World is his magnum opus, and as yet only the third English translation from his vast and important body of work.
An eye-opening survey of how extractive industries power globalization and how to fight back, by one of the world’s leading experts on the oil industry and Middle Eastern politics
A succinct survey of how oil is pumped, refined, traded and used, as well as a witty and always engaging look at the shady worlds of corporate cronyism, management consultancy and the legal grey zones of offshore tax havens and shell companies. Understand why the world is still run by oil, and how the balance of global power is shifting—and will continue to shift as the climate crisis ramps up, as the US and China rattle sabres in a new Cold War era, and as pirates and proxies once again begin to target shipping in the Red Sea in the wake of the Israel-Hamas conflict. Fascinating, entertaining, and a must-have for anyone interested in international relations and the global marketplace.
Whether it’s pumping oil, mining resources or shipping commodities across oceans, the global economy runs on extraction. Promises of frictionless trade and lucrative speculation are the hallmarks of our era, but the backbone of globalization is still low-cost labor and rapacious corporate control. Extractive capitalism is what made—and is still making—our unequal world. Laleh Khalili reflects on the hidden stories behind late capitalism, from seafarers abandoned on debt-ridden container ships to the nefarious reach of consultancy firms and the cronyism that drives record-breaking profits. Extractive Capitalism reveals the dark truths behind the world’s most crucial industries.
Chris Philo’s book offers the first attempt to systematically explore the ‘geographies’ integral to the thinking of Theodor Adorno, whose writings—on philosophy and sociology, politics and culture, literature and music—were often framed precisely against the threat of fascistic regression. By disclosing Adorno’s geographies, the shape of a geographical antifascism comes into view as a transformative restatement of critical geography’s spirit and purpose.
Chris Philo will introduce the book before responding to commentaries from Stuart Elden, on the book’s place within geographical interventions in the history of ideas, and from Felicitas Kübler, on Adorno in the 1960s and his relationship to student activism. There will also be opportunity for questions and more general discussion.
Please note that registration for this seminar will close 24 hours in advance so that the meeting link can be distributed to registered attendees.
Translation of the entry ‘MEGA’ in the Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism (Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus[HKWM]), vol. 9/I (Hamburg: Argument, 2018), pp. 388-404. Part I written by Rolf Hecker, Manfred Neuhaus, Richard Sperl, and part II by Hu Xiaochen.
The relationship between Hegel and literary theory has for a long time been both contested and paradoxical. On the one hand, “theory” is often skeptical of all that Hegel ostensibly stood for: idealism, systematicity, and identity at the expense of difference. Yet, in spite of itself, literary theory is taken to owe a profound debt to Hegel’s philosophy. Robert Lucas Scott’s book complicates this account and argues that literary theory has made the mistake of abstracting Hegel’s thought from its more dynamic presentation in Hegel’s writings, reducing “Hegel” to a series of propositions or positions. Literary theory, Scott argues, misses what is perhaps the greatest innovation of Hegel’s philosophy: a presentation of experience that begins precisely by setting aside all preconceptions or prior assumptions. It is on this point that Hegel’s philosophy itself approaches literature: its content cannot be simply abstracted from the singular experience of reading it. Only through a mode of reading alive to speculative experience can literary theory become truly Hegelian. Scott’s exposition of Hegel offers a model of reading with relevance beyond philosophy: one that is critical without pretensions of mastery and detachment and that honors the singularity of the reading experience without succumbing to the subjectivism of the “postcritical.”
The book also includes engagements with the work of Luther, Kant, Marx, Gillian Rose, Fredric Jameson, Robert Brandom, Catherine Malabou, and more in its recovery of Hegel’s thought for a critical understanding of our time.
I’ve been doing a lot more work in archives in the United States for this project over the past few weeks. I had a few days up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which was even colder than New York. There, I was able to see the small file of Ferdinand de Saussure papers at Harvard, and some things in the Maurice Blanchot papers relating to Émile Benveniste and Foucault. Harvard also have George Sarton’s archive, which includes some interesting correspondence with Alexandre Koyré. I also had a day at MIT, which has Roman Jakobson’s archive, which has some interesting material on different things, including correspondence. His correspondence with Claude Lévi-Strauss and Benveniste has been published, but not his interesting correspondence with Koyré. The MIT archive also has the complete manuscript of a very interesting radio interview which I’d seen in part in Paris, in the Tzvetan Todorov archive.
Hayden Library, MITHoughton Library, Harvard UniversityEntrance to the Special Collections reading room in Capen Hall, University at Buffalo
In New York, I looked at the records of the New York Institute for the Humanities, at New York University. This was partly because of Foucault’s 1980 lecture with Richard Sennett, published as “Sexuality and Solitude”, and its related seminar. I write about that seminar, in particular the people who attended and the readings they did, here. The Institute also has a file of a lecture with the title ‘Roman Jakobson’. I had initially thought it might be a lecture by Jakobson, but it’s actually by Edmund Leach, given as a tribute a few months after Jakobson’s death. There is an audio recording here. I also had a morning at the New School, which has some material relating to Alexandre Koyré’s time teaching there. Following that and some other research, I wrote up a list of Koyré’s Wartime Teaching at the École Libre des Hautes Études and the New School, based on published traces and catalogues.
I made some more visits to the Columbia University archives, looking at some more Koyré correspondence, and some publisher archives. One file from the Zone books archive, on Georges Dumézil’s Mitra-Varuna had a completely unexpected claim about a translation of Foucault, which I will write about in a future ‘Sunday History’. [Update May 2025: It’s now available as Who translated Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things?] There is a lot more in the Columbia archives which I’m planning to look at, particularly relating to one moment in the career of Roman Jakobson.
While I’m based in the United States, I’m trying to complete the archival work here for this project, but also to gather some material for a future project or two. For various reasons it’s unclear when I’ll next have much time here. I should be back in New England in the autumn, but I’m not sure how long I’ll have on that trip. So, with that in mind, I’ve also been making a lot of requests to other archives, to get a sense of the scope of some of their collections and whether material can be scanned or if I need to visit. My experience is that after the pandemic restrictions, many more archives are open to making things available than before. There seems to be no obvious logic as to whether this is done free of charge (for fairly small amounts), nominal fees, or quite a lot – $1 a page can quickly add up. But overall, it is working out well and I’m more than happy to pay to save on travel. But there is some stuff I still want to see in person – the materiality of stuff can still be interesting.
Earlier this month I gave a talk at the University at Buffalo about this project, on “French Theory and the Indo-Europeans”. Luke Folk and Krzysztof Ziarek invited me, and it was very good to meet them and their colleagues, including Roger Woodard, with whom I’ve been speaking about this project for a while, but not previously met. While I was in Buffalo I worked through the material they have in their Special Collections about Foucault’s 1970 and 1972 visits there. Leonhard Riep has written a short and very interesting piece on Foucault’s 1972 lecture course in Buffalo, for which a series of recordings exist. Leonhard’s piece is due to be published in Foucault Studies later this year, and I’ll share a link when it’s up. The 1972 course is due for publication in the Vrin series edited by Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Daniele Lorenzini, with this volume edited by Fruchaud and Orazio Irrera. This course, whose final title was “Histoire de la verité”, uses material from Foucault’s first two Collège de France courses, but one reason for its importance is that those courses had to be edited on the basis of the manuscripts, since there were no recordings. The recordings of the Buffalo lectures really help fill in our sense of this material. There are also a couple of recordings which are probably from the 1970 course, and a lot of correspondence and other material relating to the visits. I have written a short essay about this material, which will be in the Foucault Studies ‘Buffalo dossier’ along with Leonhard’s piece. I’ll share a shorter summary on this site soon [Update May 2025: now available here].
I have upcoming trips to Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study, a return to the New York Public Library, this time to the Berg collection, and more time at Columbia University. Further ahead, I’m going to Chicago in April to take an initial look at the Mircea Eliade papers. As well as the Buffalo lecture, I presented on some of the work at the Remarque Institute at NYU in one of their lunchtime seminars on ‘Benveniste in the Second World War’. I’ll be giving one more short talk at Remarque in April at an event on ‘Troubling Classical Bodies’ along with Anurima Banerji and Brooke Holmes. You can join that one remotely on Zoom. I’ll be speaking about Benveniste and Sogdian. [Update May 2025: the video of the event is here and the text of my talk here.]
I recently put the audio recordings of two talks on this project up on this site.
– “The Ideology of the Indo-Europeans”, Future of Ideologies webinar, University of Nottingham, 29 January 2025 (audio) – this is a shorter version of the St Andrews talk, with a little additional material.
Between 1850 and 1870, Napoleon III and his Prefect of the Seine, Baron Haussmann, created the modern city of Paris out of the congested and ill-equipped capital of the eighteenth century. They gave Paris many of its present major streets, its great municipal parks, the Central Markets, the Opera House and other well-known buildings, and a water supply system and sewer network that still serve the city. In Napoleon III and the Rebuilding of Paris, David Pinkney tells the story of how Paris was transformed and examines the many challenges that the venture faced, including an increasing population, engineering problems, political complications, and personality clashes. Pinkney sets the undertaking in the context of French political and economic history, shows its relation to the public health movement of the mid-nineteenth century, and explains its significance in the history of city planning.
